Donations from VACCINATION FOR AFRICA 2013 helped launch East Africa’s first mobile cheese school.

Together with Austrian cheese experts, a Veterinarians Without Borders team will travel the expansive Maasai steppe and instruct resident farmers in the art of cheese production. The training program is structured in several stages and based on direct "hands on training." We shall set up camp in the middle of the villages that we visit, show vivid, easy to understand educational films and produce there cheese, butter and whey drinks together with the dairy farmers. Villages will be visited several times within a few weeks so that we can make sure that the new knowledge is used optimally and sustainably. Specific questions can be answered directly by our expert team and tricky problems solved together.

The mobile cheese school builds upon our successful pilot project from VACCINATION FOR AFRICA 2011. In recent years we have managed to build a dairy situated in the tribal area of the Parakuyo-Maasai in East Africa. Under very simple, traditional conditions, Parakuyo-Maasai produce the best cheese.

Durable foods, such as cheese, increase the value of the staple milk and thereby secure food and economic survival of the Maasai. While the sale of 1 liter of raw milk on the Dar es Salaam market converts to only about € 0.13 to € 0.20, 1 kilo of semi-hard cheese sells for € 12. The income achieved by producing cheese is therefore enormous compared with fresh milk. Now by selling a kilogram of cheese a Maasai woman can purchase from the local market

• 43 kg of maize flour
• 20 kg of rice or
• 15 kg of sugar

and thus feed her whole family for a month. The sale of 3 kg of cheese can even pay for a year of school fees for a Maasai child at a higher secondary school.